1
I
German socialist literature grows worse from month to month. It increasingly confines itself to the broad effusions of those true socialists whose whole wisdom amounts to an amalgam of German philosophy and German-philistine sentimentality with a few stunted communist slogans. It exhibits a peacefulness which enables it even under the censorship to state its most heartfelt opinions. Even the German police find little in it to take exception to — proof enough that it belongs not to the progressive, revolutionary elements but to the stale, reactionary elements in German literature.
To these true socialists belong not only those who term themselves socialists par excellence, but also the greater part of those writers in Germany who have accepted the party name of Communists. The latter indeed are, if possible, even worse.
Under these circumstances, it goes without saying that these soi-disant communist writers are in no way representative of the Party of the German Communists. They are neither recognised by the Party as its literary representatives nor do they represent its interests. On the contrary, they look after quite other interests, they defend quite other principles, which are opposed in every respect to those of the Communist Party.
The true socialists, to whom, as we have said, most German soi-disant communist writers belong, have learnt from the French Communists that the transition from the absolute monarchy to the modern representative state in no way abolishes the poverty of the great mass of the people, but only brings a new class, the bourgeoisie, to power. They have further learnt from the French Communists that it is precisely this bourgeoisie which, by means of its capital, presses most heavily upon the masses, and hence is the opponent par excellence of the Communists, or socialists respectively, as representatives of the mass of the people. They have not taken the trouble to compare Germany's level of social and political development with that of France, nor to study the conditions actually existing in Germany upon which all further development depends; hastily and without long reflection they have transferred their hastily acquired knowledge to Germany. Had they been Party men who aimed at a practical, tangible result, who represented particular interests common to an entire class, they would at least have paid attention to the way in which the opponents of the bourgeoisie in France, from the editors of La Réforme to the ultra-Communists, such as in particular the acknowledged representative of the great mass of the French proletariat, old Cabet, behave in their polemic against the bourgeoisie. It should really have struck them that these representatives of the Party not merely engage continually in politics of the day, but that even towards political measures such as proposals for electoral reforms, in which the proletariat has no direct interest, they nevertheless adopt an attitude far removed from sovereign disdain. But our true socialists are not Party men, they are German theoreticians. They are not concerned with practical interests and results, but with eternal truth. The interests which they strive to uphold are the interests of "man", the results they pursue are limited to philosophical "achievements". So they only needed to bring their new elucidations into harmony with their own philosophical conscience, in order then to noise abroad before the whole of Germany that political progress, like all politics, is evil, that constitutional freedom in particular elevates to the throne the bourgeoisie, the class most dangerous to the people, and that in general the bourgeoisie cannot be attacked enough.
In France, the rule of the bourgeoisie has for seventeen years been more complete than in any other country in the world. The attacks of the French proletarians, their Party chiefs and literary representatives on the bourgeoisie were therefore attacks on the ruling class, on the existing political system, they were definitely revolutionary attacks. How well the ruling bourgeoisie knows this is proven by the countless press trials and prosecutions of associations, the prohibition of meetings and banquets, the hundred police chicaneries with which it persecutes the Réformistes[60] and Communists. In Germany, things are completely different. In Germany the bourgeoisie is not only not in power, it is even the most dangerous enemy of the existing governments. For these the diversion mounted by the true socialists was very opportune. The struggle against the bourgeoisie, which only too often brought the French Communists imprisonment or exile, brought our true socialists nothing except the permission to print. The revolutionary heat in the polemics by the French proletariat dwindled in the cool breasts of the German theoreticians to a tepidness satisfying the censorship and in this emasculated state was a quite welcome ally for the German governments against the threatening bourgeoisie. True socialism managed to use the most revolutionary propositions that have ever been framed as a protective wall for the morass of the German status quo. True socialism is reactionary through and through.
The bourgeoisie long ago noticed this reactionary tendency of true socialism. But without further thought they took this trend for the literary representative also of German communism, and reproached the Communists publicly and privately with merely playing into the hands of the governments, the bureaucracy, and the nobility with their polemics against a representative system, trial by jury, freedom of the press, and their clamour against the bourgeoisie.
It is high time that the German Communists disowned the responsibility imputed to them for the reactionary deeds and desires of the true socialists. It is high time that the German Communists, who represent the German proletariat with its very clear, very tangible needs, broke in the most decisive manner with that literary clique — for it is nothing more — which does not know itself whom it represents, and so against its will tumbles into the arms of the German governments; which believes itself to be "realising man" and is realising nothing but the deification of the wretched German philistine. We Communists have in fact nothing in common with the theoretical phantasms and scruples of conscience of this crafty company. Our attacks on the bourgeoisie differ as much from those of the true socialists as from those o£the reactionary nobles, e. g., the French legitimists or Young England.[61] The German status quo cannot exploit our attacks in any way, because they are directed still more against it than against the bourgeoisie. If the bourgeoisie, so to speak, our natural enemy, is the enemy whose overthrow will bring our party to power, the German status quo is still more our enemy, because it stands between the bourgeoisie and us, because it hinders us from coming to grips with the bourgeoisie. For that reason we do not exclude ourselves in any way from the great mass of opposition to the German status quo. We only form its most advanced section — a section which at the same time through its unconcealed arrière pensée against the bourgeoisie takes up a quite definite position.
Endnotes
[59] Engels intended to publish this work in 1847 as a pamphlet. In the spring of 1847 he sent the manuscript from Paris (where he arrived in August 1846 to organise communist propaganda) to Marx in Brussels to be forwarded to the publisher C.G. Vogler, who had connections with communist circles. Vogler, however, had meantime been arrested (see Marx's letter to Engels of May 15, 1847). Marx gave a high appraisal of this pamphlet, especially of its first part, but was of the opinion that the other two parts were lacking in precision. The extant manuscript is incomplete. Only seven sheets, each folded in four (28 pages altogether), with the author's paging on the first page of each sheet (1, 5, 9, etc.) have been preserved. Pages 21-24 and the last sheets are missing. There is no title to the manuscript. The extant part was first published in the USSR in 1929 in the first edition of Marx's and Engels' Works in Russian under the title "The Constitutional Question in German Socialist Literature" and in 1932 in German in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe under the title "Der Status quo in Deutschland". The present title is given according to Engels' letter to Marx of March 9, 1847, in which this work was called "a pamphlet on the constitutional question".
[60] Réformistes—a political party grouped round the Paris newspaper La Réforme, which included radical opponents of the July monarchy — republican democrats and petty-bourgeois socialists. The leaders of the Réforme party, which also called itself "social-democratic", were Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc and others (see K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, this volume, p. 518).
[61] Some of the French legitimists, advocates of the Bourbon dynasty overthrown in 1830, who upheld the interests of the big hereditary landowners (Villeneuve-Bargemont and others), resorted to social demagogy in their struggle against the financial and industrial bourgeoisie, passing themselves off as defenders of the working people. Young England was a group of conservative writers and politicians, including Disraeli and Ferrand, who were close to the Tory philanthropists and founded a separate group in the House of Commons in 1841. Voicing the discontent of the landed aristocracy at the growing economic and political power of the bourgeoisie, they criticised the capitalist system and supported half-hearted philanthropic measures for improving the conditions of the workers. Young England disinte-grated as a political group in 1845 and ceased to exist as a literary circle in 1848. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels describe the views of Young England and the above-mentioned ideologists of legitimism as "feudal socialism" (see this volume, pp. 507-08).